The atmosphere was one of a strained energetics: all of us, delegates at an inter- disciplinary workshop, were wanting – in fact, longing – to find points of connec- tion and reassurance across what might have been seen as yawning disciplinary divides. Our expertise stretched from early medieval history, to early modern history, to cognitive psychology, to medical humanities, to geography. Each of us, in the course of the workshop, had been plunged, during talks, into the strange alterity of worlds and modes of academic presentation very different from our own; many in the room had discerned wonderful and startling connections between accounts of people’s sensory perceptions in different time periods, and current models in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to investigate those phenomena. Delegates frequently used phrases such as ‘this reminds me of something from my own field’; ‘this resonates with a concept from my discipline’; ‘it seems to be the same formulation’. Felicity began to wonder if we weren’t all working rather too hard, and if there might not be something to be said, ulti- mately, for sometimes not connecting.
In this chapter, we have worked with and through some of the spatio- temporal imaginaries through which researchers might plot as well as practise interdisciplinary research. We have used four terms (which are also, and variously, phenomena, constructs, abstractions, and metaphori- cal resources) to open up ways of conceptualizing the spatial organization of interdisciplinarity that push beyond those indebted to particular ways of carving territory and terrain, and that centre on producing connec- tion, entanglement, and ingestion in the collaborative sphere.
Yet one important problem remains. In the current impetus towards collaboration, there is, we suggest, an implicit normative assumption of
connection itself, and indeed of relationality as such. What happens to collaboration when connection is impossible to refuse? What becomes of those ontological and epistemological voids – which is to say, those spaces and temporalities that cannot be produced or even glimpsed within the current dispensation? Paul Harrison has argued, in response to the inter- est across a number of disciplines in ‘relation’ and ‘relationality’ (and here our earlier invocations of matrices and topologies are two such instances), that the question of the non-relational is at threat of occlusion:
it seems to me that in the proliferation of biophilosophy, the unstoppable materialisation of actor networks and constructivist totalisations of the social
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94 Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences
or the cultural, few have been asking about breaks and gaps, interruptions and intervals, caesuras and tears. (Harrison 2007, 592)
For Harrison, much more work is required to think through what is ‘meant by the term “relation” ’ if we are not simply to produce a ‘quan- titatively expanded sociospatial imaginary rather than a shift towards the appreciation of intervallic topologies, complex figures, and diverse phrases and regimens’ (Harrison 2007, 590). Consider, in this respect, the nascent interdisciplinary field of neuropsychoanalysis (Panksepp and Solms 2011). That field has founded itself on the conviction that it is possible to bring together psychoanalysis, (certain kinds of cognitive and affective) neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. But what gets missed, in such an insistence, are precisely the things that might not go together. Consider, for example, against that insistence, Jean Laplanche’s readings of Freud (e.g. Laplanche 1989), which force to the surface the impossibil- ity of making Freud’s account ‘consonant with a model of the organism that is centred around adaptive need’ (Papoulias and Callard 2012, 211). We retain an anxiety that our focus on spatial logics of collaboration is already a refusal of this impossibility. We want to learn to collaborate in a world that is constituted as much through voids and non-relation as through contact and relation.
Notes & Queries: 5
Q: What kinds of people do I need for an interdisciplinary project involv- ing the neurosciences, social sciences (and, perhaps, the humanities)? How do I arrange them?
A: This is a complex question – and one that opens in multiple directions, depending on the kind of phenomena you want to investigate, and the kinds of research you are interested in conduct- ing. We wouldn’t for a moment want to imply that one can specify in advance the kinds of people one would need without attending to the particularities of a potential project. What we would say, however – and this is in the interests of departing from the ‘layer cake’ model we have described in this chapter – is that it’s worth thinking carefully before you decide you ‘need’ a psychologist, or an anthropologist, or a sociologist, or a cognitive neuroscientist, or a clinical researcher to make your interdisciplinary project work. It
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95 Choreographing the Interdisciplinary
might be helpful to explore the function that this initially perceived ‘need’ is serving and to disarticulate expertise in particular methods (performing statistical regressions; translating medieval Latin texts) from expertise in a discipline. There is also the important question of how appropriate expertise to take part in an interdisciplinary project does not necessarily map neatly on to seniority.
In many of the interdisciplinary projects in which we have been involved, we have been struck by: (1) what emerges – what topologi- cal relations unfold – from having people in the room with expertise in disciplines not commonly regarded as central to interdiscipli- nary neuroscientific projects (e.g. a poet, a medieval historian, a composer); (2) the torqueing of various disciplinary or discursive assumptions when the project includes people with varied disci- plinary trainings (e.g. we are thinking of one of our collaborators who has expertise in computer science, anthropology, science and technology studies, and the history of science).
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